Monday, September 25, 2017

Counterpunch |LS: Is the war on drugs also a war on blacks? Let me give you
some framework for this question, because John Ehrlichman, a former top
aide to Richard Nixon, supposedly admitted that: “The Nixon campaign in
1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar
left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we
couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by
getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up
their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (1) And I
can quote from H. R. Haldeman’s diaries in this respect, of course. In
the early stages of his presidency, more specifically on April 28, 1969,
Nixon outlined his basic strategy to his chief of staff: “[President
Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem
is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this
while not appearing to.” (2) So, is the war on drugs that started under
Nixon also a war on blacks? And if so, what does this tell us about the
United States?

DV: America is a former slave state and a blatantly racist society,
so yes, the war on drugs, which is managed by white supremacists, was
and is directed against blacks and other despised minorities as a way of
keeping them disenfranchised. The old Bureau of Narcotics was blatantly
racist: not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group
supervisors (Grade 13) and manage white agents.

I interviewed former FBN Agent William Davis for my book about the FBN, The Strength of the Wolf.
Davis articulated the predicament of black agents. After graduating
from Rutgers University in 1950, Davis, while visiting New York City,
heard singer Kate Smith praising FBN Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show.
“She described him as a black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a
federal narcotic agent,” Davis recalled, “and that was my inspiration. I
applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon
found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold
positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or
give direction to whites. The few black agents we had at any one time,”
he said bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities
heaped upon us.”

Davis told how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the
1930s, created a patent medicine. But McCree made the mistake of
writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that prosecutors in the South
were calling black agents “niggers.” As a result, the FBN’s legal staff
charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine.
McCree was fired with the intended ripple effect: his dismissal sent a
clear message that complaints from black agents would not be tolerated.

In an interview for The Strength of the Wolf, Clarence
Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police
in the 1970s, explained to me the racial situation from local law
enforcement’s perspective. “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because
it was easy,” he said. “We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us
to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man
we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no
money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no
expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case. So
rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can
make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in.
We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no
interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”

Anyone who thinks it is any different nowadays is living in a fantasy
world. Where I live, in Longmeadow, MA, the cops are the first line of
defense against the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the nearby city of
Springfield. About 15 years ago, there was a Mafia murder in
Springfield’s Little Italy section. At the time, blacks and Puerto
Ricans ere moving into the neighborhood and there was a lot of racial
tension. The local TV station interviewed me about it, and I said the Al
Bruno, the murdered Mafia boss, was probably an FBI informant. The next
day, people I knew wouldn’t talk to me. Comments were made. Someone
told me Bruno’s son went to the same health club as me. In a city like
Springfield and its suburban neighborhoods, everyone is related to or
friends with someone in the Mafia.

A few years before Bruno’s murder, I had befriended the janitor at
the health club I belong to. By chance, the janitor was the son of a
Springfield narcotics detective. The janitor and I shot pool and drank
beers in local bars. One day he told me a secret his father had told
him. His father told him that the Springfield cops let the Mafia bosses
bring narcotics into Springfield and in exchange, the hoods named their
black and Puerto Ricans customers. That way, like Giarusso said above,
the cops keep making cases and the minority communities have a harder
time buying houses and encroaching on the established whites in their
neighborhoods. This happens everywhere in the US every day.

LS: Is it ironic to you that the whole drug trade wouldn’t exist
as it does today if the drugs were not illegal in the first place?

DV: The outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction
from a matter of “public health” into a law enforcement issue, and thus a
pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal
justice and social welfare systems to prevent despised minorities from
making political and social advances. The health care industry was
placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of
despised minorities, the poor and working classes. Private businesses
established civic institutions to sanctify this repressive policy.
Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political
indoctrination promoting the Business Party’s racist line. Bureaucracies
were established to promote the expansion of business interests abroad,
while suppressing political and social resistance to the medical,
pharmaceutical, drug manufacturing and law enforcement industries that
benefited from it.

It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations
of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire
regulation of the industries that profit from it. Briefly stated, they
profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say
that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the
government to unleash and transform their economic power into political
and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or
cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource,
upon which all of the above industries – including the military –
depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a
matter of national security. Read my books for examples of how this has
played out over the past 70 years.

LS: In what form and fashion is the Phoenix program alive today in America’s homeland?

DV: Karl Marx explained over 150 years ago how and why capitalists
treat workers the same, whether at home or abroad. As capitalism evolves
and centralizes its power, as the climate degenerates, as the gap
between rich and poor widens, and as resources become scarcer, America
police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics
to use against the civilian population. The government has enacted
“administrative detention” laws, which are the legal basis for
Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion
of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic
method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with
those conducting “anti-terror” operations, and the Department of
Homeland Security has established “fusion centers” based on this model
around the nation. Informant nets and psychological operations against
the American people have also proliferated since 9-11. This is all
explained in detail in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime.

LS: How important is mainstream media for the public perception of the CIA?

DV: It’s the most critical feature. Guy Debord said that secrecy
dominates the world, foremost as secret of domination. The media
prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the
CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing.

What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling
capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic
audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media
outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But
when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts
democratic institutions.

Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on
double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media
self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of
information requires media complicity. This was one of the great lesson
defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly indoctrinated and well
rewarded managers who run the government and media will never again
allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians.
Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, and
Syrian children killed by marauding US mercenary forces and cluster
bombs.

On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture,
and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper
story is the key. Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already
become the template for providing internal political security for
America’s leaders.

LS: Is the CIA an enemy of the American people?

DV: Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.